A Delicate Matter
Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France
Oliver Wunsch
A Delicate Matter
Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France
Oliver Wunsch
“In an era of scholarship drunk on the sociological demystification of art, Oliver Wunsch’s book offers us that rare thing—a study of the social forces shaping art that illuminates aesthetic achievement.”
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While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period’s reconceptualization of art. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artists’ writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, Wunsch demonstrates how the technical practices of eighteenth-century painters and sculptors provoked a broad transformation in the relationship between art, time, and money. Delicacy, which began the eighteenth century as a commodified extension of courtly sociability, was by century’s end reimagined as the irreducible essence of art’s autonomous value.
Innovative and original, A Delicate Matter is an important intervention in the growing body of scholarship on durability and conservation in eighteenth-century French art. It challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art’s meaning and purpose.
“In an era of scholarship drunk on the sociological demystification of art, Oliver Wunsch’s book offers us that rare thing—a study of the social forces shaping art that illuminates aesthetic achievement.”
“Wunsch’s elegant, jargon-free writing deftly integrates voices from numerous primary sources and presents complex ideas with a remarkable balance of clarity and nuance.”
“Central to Wunsch’s remarkably tight-focused book is the suggestion that the perishability of art, long seen by art historians as little more than an impediment to research, is a subject of interest in itself; a feature, rather than a bug.”
“A lyrical and witty rereading of eighteenth-century French art that connects the popularity of physically fragile artworks—from cracking Watteau paintings to precarious Clodion terracottas by way of disintegrating pastel paintings and quixotic experiments with encaustic—to a nascent consumer culture dependent on ephemeral goods. Wunsch adroitly joins sophisticated technical analysis to a thought-provoking argument about the ways in which the market shaped artistic practice, art collecting, and aesthetic theory.”
Oliver Wunsch is Assistant Professor of Art History at Boston College.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Fragile and the Flimsy
1. Watteau’s Délicatesse
2. Pastel and the Allure of Fragility
3. Wax, Fire, and the Fashion for Permanence
4. Clodion’s Fragile Monuments
Epilogue: This Is So Contemporary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction
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